We recently connected with Franziska Koch and have shared our conversation below.
Franziska, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
Working as a husband and wife team, we have the advantage of being able to split tasks among each other. Each of us has different strengths and interests and figuring out those strengths and developing skills and interests down the road helped us immensely to get the business running.
Not immediately outsourcing tasks that might seem boring or too hard to do is another aspect that really helped us to understand more of the business side. We are now able to trouble shoot without the help of others. From here we can still get support but it was important to us to understand the basics and not be dependent on another businesses.
Another huge keyword is persistence. We realized that we will not see success immediately. But after time you’ll get there.
Team work / trust / support
persistance
goals / dreams
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
We are Franzi & Martin, a husband and wife wedding photography team. After Martin received a job offer in beautiful Charleston in 2015, we got married within a month and both moved from Germany to the US. I had trouble finding a job immediately so I started photographing real estate for a Charleston company. Two years in I founded my own company, photographing weddings and interior design. Martin slowly got into it with me – learning alongside and supporting me on the administrative side of business. We are now running a successful wedding photo business that allows us to travel to the most beautiful parts of the US.
For us it’s all about our couples’ experiences. Our goal is to make everyone feel comfortable and beautiful in front of our camera. No awkward posing – we promise. Creating unique, artsy and true to life images is why our couples love to come back for all their milestone events in life. We support our clients throughout the entire process, no matter if it’s a big wedding or a carefully planned proposal.
Capturing raw emotions and moments you might miss or forget over time, is what we love doing most!
Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?
This is not necessarily a sales story but how learning SEO was one of the most important marketing steps in our business. When Covid hit in 2020 we had a lot of free time. We also had a website that didn’t rank well and couldn’t be found easily – or at all. After trying different ways of marketing and spending – or should we say wasting – a ton of money, we decided to get familiar with how SEO actual works. Being able to be found on page one without spending any money was the goal. For most people, learning about SEO doesn’t sound really interesting – especially for creatives like us. It’s pretty dry and often times a guessing game. And that’s why you can spend a fortune to have someone else take care of it. After we had signed up for an online coaching and investing easily about 150 hours between each other in learning, designing, creating and building our new website, half a year later we hit the publish button. It took Google two weeks and there we were – on page one. The very first wedding we booked because we were showing up on page one was a three day Indian wedding including the biggest sale back then. For us that was huge!
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
On the business side we’d say reliability and building a great and supportive network helped a lot. We truly believe that good communication with vendors (- and clients) is key as well as the little things like always being punctual to appointments, being honest, flexible and friendly. Supporting each other and showing interests in others will not only spark ideas for your own business but will also build great relationships and trust.
On the creative side of business we’d say evolving our style and client experience helped us grow. We keep educating ourselves as well as adding to our photography skills and people can tell the difference.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://franziannika.photography
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/franziannika.photography/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/franziannika.photography/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/franziska-koch-1666a71a6/
Image Credits
Franzi Annika Photography